The essential difference is that in generic software product development, the specification is owned by the product developer. For custom product development, the specification is owned and controlled by the customer. The implications of this are significant – the developer can quickly decide to change the specification in response to some external change (e.g. a competing product) but, when the customer owns the specification, changes have to be negotiated between the customer and the developer and may have contractual implications. For users of generic products, this means they have no control over the software specification so cannot control the evolution of the product. The developer may decide to include/exclude features and change the user interface. This could have implications for

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Four important attributes are maintainability, dependability, performance and
usability. Other attributes that may be significant could be reusability (can it be
reused in other applications), distributability (can it be distributed over a network
of processors), portability (can it operate on multiple platforms e.g laptop and
mobile platforms) and inter-operability (can it work with a wide range of other
software systems).
Decompositions of the 4 key attributes e.g. dependability decomposes to security,
safety, availability, etc. is also a valid answer to this question.